Sourcehut Moving to Europe | Hacker News Reader

Sourcehut Moving to Europe

81 pointsprima-facie14 comments

Just received this:

Hello!

I'm writing to let you know that, as part of our work to move our business operations from the United States to Europe, we are rolling out changes to our terms of service and privacy policy. As promised, we are giving you two weeks notice and a chance to participate in the discussion about the proposed changes.

You can review the diff of the proposed changes on the sr.ht-dev mailing list:

https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-dev/patches/60282

The changes will take effect from July 10th, provided that there are no further revisions based on user feedback. Further changes will be discussed on sr.ht-dev rather than emailed to you directly.

If you have questions or comments, you can participate in this thread, or you can reply to this email to reach support directly.

-- Drew DeVault SourceHut

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Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44365246

Honestly a good idea. I don't see a single negative that can come from this, plus they are going to be more immune from unchecked governments

Well, the obvious negative one should always consider is whether the consumer needs to pay more. A nonzero number of employee hours were spent on this migration and we should expect to see that reflected in the accounting somewhere.

I would say the same thing for EU to US migrations, to be clear. This is just something that should always be considered reflexively.

On the other hand, people in Europe are more and more trying to find alternatives to US services. Whereas people looking into SourceHut from the US would probably to it because they want an alternative to TooBigTech (not necessarily a US alternative? Not sure).

That isn't at odds with the concept of prices being affected. If anything, we would expect the fracturing of larger markets into smaller markets (by any means - here it's geopolitical and trust driven) to raise prices on everyone, US and Europe alike. Perfect competition assumes infinite players for a reason, after all.

> one should always consider is whether the consumer needs to pay more

That makes sense in the traditional/American viewpoint of aiming to maximize profits, or however it goes.

But Sourcehut seems to take a different viewpoint than that, with a big focus on 100% FOSS, then Europe obviously makes much more sense than the US, even if there is a non-zero amount of hours involved with the migration. And with the FOSS perspective, the move vice-versa wouldn't make much sense at all.

upvote to both of you. both points are valid and both perspectives are fine.

Europe doesn't "obviously" make much more sense than anywhere else for FOSS. I know of no law in the US that says e.g. you can't license software under BSD-3 without a notarization or whatever.

More importantly, the comparison you are drawing equates the "American viewpoint" of aiming to maximize profits directly to the goal of aiming to minimize cost to the end consumer. As in: "Yeah, our customers have to pay $30 instead of $20 a year now that we're EU-based, but so what? We're not in it to maximize profits." Excuse me?

> Europe doesn't "obviously" make much more sense than anywhere else for FOSS. I know of no law in the US that

It's not about laws, but about the community. If you're building a community and organization that is 100% about serving a specific community (in this case FOSS), then it makes sense to be wherever that community is strongest and healthiest, so in this case Europe. Regardless of laws.

> As in: "Yeah, our customers have to pay $30 instead of $20 a year now that we're EU-based, but so what? We're not in it to maximize profits." Excuse me?

That's you're still thinking in terms of "customers" and charging people higher/lower just makes it more obvious how Americans are constantly focused on profits and money. I don't see how that made up argument is even applicable here, care to explain without any more contrived examples?

What if Europe changes its mind?

"Europe" is as likely to change its mind about anything as "North America" is about changing its mind about anything.

Then everyone is in for a bad time. But a minor chance for a future negative outcome cannot outweigh a much larger chance for the same outcome right now, can it?

More interesting: Which European country they are located.

Europe does not enforce law. The local state create laws, Europe is only creating guidelines which are implemented into national law. There is a European court however, who can overturn national laws (or at least fine the nations into submission).

> Europe is only creating guidelines which are implemented into national law.

wrong. EU law very much exists.

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